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I've been scratching my head on this. How does a business survive and thrive when their product is, in fact, not theirs but the community at large?
There's a more fundamental question that I think needs to be answered first. What open source project offers the most for a business to adopt it and create a strategy around it? Why does one succeed and another very similar fail?
Infrastructure is my first answer. The project must be a major component of the enterprise IT infrastructure. Whatever the project is, it must replace a key, existing, commercial component. By replace I mean, it achieves parity with the product it is replacing.
Certainly there are more but the examples below provide some very good talking points. They are all what I would categorize as successful businesses whose core existence is built around an open source project.
- Red Hat and SuSe
- MySQL and EnterpriseDB
- WSO2
- Zmanda
Red Hat and Linux are the obvious poster children for this discussion. Red Hat was a free Linux distro but they recognized the need for standardization. At the time of their emergence there were distro's popping up all over and many were based on theirs so they obviously had a good model or at least one worth copying. Their IPO rang out across Wall Street and not long after everyone knew Red Hat was going to achieve something even though they may still be confused about how to pronounce Linux. They filled a need by replacing proprietary and costly operating systems, achieved parity by providing an stable environment, and they extended the open source piece through additional offerings and services. Services run the gambit from professional onsite services to phone support to training and certifications. And JBoss! It has had the effect of catapulting Red Hat to compete step for step with the likes of IBM and Oracle.
Having followed and used Linux since the mid 90's I have seen a dramatic shift in the UNIX gear deployed in datacenters today. I mentioned SuSe but don't feel the need to type much about it. Not to belittle SuSe but they were only mentioned to get additional credence to the Red Hat example.
MySQL produced such a sound model they were recently purchased by Sun Microsystems to the tune of $1 billion dollars. I'm not sure I'd be thrilled about that. Sun doesn't exactly have an outstanding track record when it comes to purchasing software companies and making them better. This doesn't detract from the fact that MySQL has been a favorite among the open source community for being lite and simple but also expendable and versatile. Their offerings mimic Red Hat filling needs for the serious datacenters with cluster offerings to professional services, support and training.
EnterpriseDB offers a database "that is compatible with applications written for Oracle". Whoa. They better watch it less they provoke Ellison.
WSO2 has a huge bag of tricks for extending and supporting Apache based sites.
Zmanda has a datacenter ready offering that competes with the likes of NetBackup and Networker.
I could keep going and that would make this a very long winded post. What I need to point out are the things that I have found again and again in every scenario. Services, services, services. Sure, ancillary products help and highlight the capabilities of the base product but every business has a complete set of services. Professional services to help with onsite needs to augment existing staff. Phone support to give management the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with have someone else to lean on when things go wrong. Training to keep fulltimers happy.
There are many popular open source projects out there that could benefit from a having a corporate sponsor. The problem may be in picking the right one.
Next post I'll talk a bit more about this.
Updated March 6, 2008 per spelling Nazi email.
